Am running a pretty complicated setup between the mian house and guest house. Main house router -> D Link ethernet over power line -> Belkin router in the guest house running as an access point.
DHCP is working fine, my Acer Iconia tab has no problems at all mating to the guest house wifi and getting main house internet access.
Windows 7 laptops are another story. My laptop worked OK for about an hour, with the only problem being that Windows 7 saw the network as an unknown one (most likely because the DHCP assignment did not come from the MAC address the wifi was connected to) and thus treated it as public, in spite of the fact it’s private.
Then it died completely. I have a valid DHCP assignment from the router, ipconfig /all shows I’m connected, shows my DNS servers and thus it appears the laptop is talking to the router and being talked to by the router.
But, no internet. Windows 7 says it can’t identify the network, and also says there’s no internet connection.
Any ideas? Other than throwing the Win7 laptop in the trash and using a more stable and reliable OS like XP?
My network failed after AT&T replaced my DSL modem. Turns out the modem had it’s own router inside that was trying to do DHCP and other stuff my router needed to do.
Thankfully there’s a feature called Bridge Mode on AT&T DSL modems. Bridge Mode turns the DSL modem into a “dumb modem”. Turns off all the internal router stuff that your own router needs to do.
You can google your dsl modems model. It took me almost an hour to track down an obsecure AT&T support page that walked me through the steps for bridge mode. I recall there were also some special settings required on my Linksys Router too. I had to configure it to log into the DSL network with PPOE. Because the modem wouldn’t do it in bridge mode.
I would say that you are running more than one of these devices as a DHCP server. Make sure only one of them is set to assign IP addresses and it should “clear it up”…
This is a Windows 7 box. These commands are deprecated. And in any event, I have a valid DHCP assignment from the router. In fact once you ipconfig /release you cannot even do a /renew because Windows 7 expects you to be connected to a network in order to renew the IP and the release command disconnects you from your current network.
Not DSL, cable, but that’s irrelevant. I have only one DHCP server and that’s on the router in the main house. The guest house is function as an Access Point, and with my Acer Iconia (Android) I have no issues. The problem is only occurring with the Windows 7 laptops.
And in any event, these features are not present in Windows 7.
Unless Windows 7 is somehow running its own DHCP server on the laptop, no, this is not the case.
What’s very odd is I woke up this morning, used the laptop for about 30 minutes, everything worked fine. Through no direct action of my own, the internet stopped working. Windows 7 says I’m still on the network, but there is no internet access. Windows 7 successfully created a network map and I could see the other devices on the network. But no internet access, either through a domain name or direct IP address entry.
It seems my suspicions about Windows 7 are being confirmed. Having Googled this issue I find it’s commonly reported on TechNet and no resolutions are provided.
I wonder if it’s because the SSID on the AP is hidden. I don’t have these issues with this very same laptop at my shop, running the exact same type of configuration (cable modem->router->router with DHCP turned off running as an AP->laptop).
This seems quite promising. Many thanks for the link. I’ve found that at least on my laptop (and not the wife’s) that remapping the network seems to restore internet connectivity. It’s all very weird to me because intranet connectivity seems to remain working and I can move files amongst the computers on the network…just no intarwebs :mad:
We saw something similar on our corporate network with Windows 7, where the router would refuse to recognize traffic for machines that were off the network (e.g. suspended) and then returned. What was happening for us was that the router had a setting that rescinded the lease earlier than the stated expiration time (Cisco Authorized ARP), and another setting that refused traffic from IP addresses that it didn’t give out (Cisco Secured ARP). This wasn’t a problem for Windows XP machines because they would do a full DHCP renew if the DHCP server didn’t reply. Windows 7 machines don’t do that, and just keep their existing IP address until it expires, so the router ignored their traffic.
I’m not suggesting that you have the same issue, but there’s a reason why Windows 7 behaves differently, because the DHCP handling is different (though still within DHCP specs). I’m not convinced that the Browser election issue is the root cause either, but can you tell us if you have the same SSID in the guest house as the main house? Have you tried changing it to a different one?
Are both routers set to give out the same IP ranges? You might try setting one router to give 192.168.x.x addresses and the second to give out 172.16.x.x addresses.